New Gears

Wednesday, 9 February 2011

Welcome to the new home of the Inner Ring.

I started coverage about a year ago and things have taken off to the point where I felt it needed a new home and also a bit of a redesign. Maybe you didn’t mind the old version but I have to look at this site a few times a day and thought it was time to shift gears.

Race Radio
Despite many of the headlines today, cycling is a wonderful sport. If you ride a bike then you must have had a few moments when you get voices in your head. Maybe it’s Phil Liggett, Franceso Pancani or Rodrigo Beenkens but some form of “he’s in a breakaway, he’s sprinting for the line, he’s going to take the yellow jersey, this is unbelievable” mental voice-over has livened up my rides over the years.

Well I was listening to something on my iPod the other day when it shuffled to one of the Cervélo documentaries from 2009/10. Suddenly I had Jean Paul Van Poppel’s radio coms in my head. It gave me an idea.

I really enjoyed the videos, it was compulsive viewing. At times it felt like you were right there in the hotel room or on the team bus. Now I hope the guys at Cervélo don’t mind but I took the voice of Van Poppel and the documentary’s theme music and put them together into one MP3 track :

I agree change is good. And I’m happy to see it.
On a graphic design critique note: typically it’s not good to mix fonts. Bolds, italics, etc of the same font don’t matter. But your title/heading and body fonts are mismatched. It’s just a visually distracting thing. Others may not care. You may not care. I’m a visual person though so I had to mention it.

Do you make money from your blogg? It’s THE BEST cycling blogg ever and I don’t understand how you can manage to work as well, but there is no commercials or product sellings either…so I was just wondering if you’re like superman 😛

Gulte: thanks! Someone was asking the question same by email. No money but… I’m thinking of advertising although I’d want to keep this selective and discreet. If I try this, I promise the site won’t be full of adverts.

As for work, it’s easy to combine with The Inner Ring, plus there’s cycling and a normal family life too. I’m in front of a computer a lot for my work. Posting new things on here is quick and easy and it takes my mind off the other work. But sometimes I type too fast, errors and spelling mistakes can happen…

Paul and Gulte – if I was some kind of hedge fund manager, trust me I’d be running my own team, not a blog. After all we’ve seen Mark Holowesko do just that with Slipstream and their development team. Instead, I’m manager… of my laptop. My last hedging strategy involved a garden tool made by Bosch. I think I mentioned something to Paul once but he is extrapolating a little to far 😉

Baruch: thanks! One guy did email me today to say he actually broke his five minute power record! Maybe this was just improving form as the European season begins? Another reader is a spin instructor and said he was going to use it in his class.